Fair point. It's a frustrating pattern that seems to repeat, and I think partially it stems from when other brands are too thick to understand why people are choosing the competitor.

Web browsers are an immediate example that comes to mind. When everyone started switching to Chrome, the other browsers fell all over themselves to strip down into minimalism, as though it was the sparse UI that was capturing users' hearts, as opposed to the rendering speed and compatibility. So then you had all these other fat, slow browsers that took away the only thing that was still distinguishing them from Chrome.

In this case though, I guess it's about money. Why put in an SD card slot when you can instead extort your customers for a cloud storage subscription or a lucrative upsale to the higher model with more storage?

Meanwhile as a customer nothing makes me more irate than "upgrading" to something that's worse because I can't replace the battery and the OS no longer gets updates.

The minimalistic UI was kind of the original headline feature, I have to note—it’s literally in the name that the browser was to be little more but chrome around the stuff the user actually cares about, that being the web page. It’s just that the other things turned out to be more important.